A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I

When the policeman came to the door and asked if Eddie Mason lived there I knew right away something had happened to him. They always break it to you that way.

“Yeah. I’m his brother.”

“Better come down and see him,” he said. I got my hat and went with him.

Eddie was in the emergency ward of the Mount Eden Hospital, he told me. He’d been found lying on his back on a lonely stretch of road out toward White Plains, slowly bleeding away.

“What is it, hit and run?” I cried, grabbing him by the sleeve.

He didn’t want to tell me at first. Then, just before we got there he said, “Well, you may sis well know now as later, I guess.” Eddie’s tongue had been tom out by the roots and all ten of his fingers had been cut off at the base, leaving just the stumps of both hands.

I went all weak at the pit of my stomach when I heard it. And then when I got the full implication of the thing, it was even worse. That poor kid. Just turned twenty. Yesterday with his life all before him. And now he’d never be able to speak another word as long as he lived, never be able to feed himself or dress himself or earn a decent living after this.

“He’d have been better off dead!” I groaned. “What did it?” I kept saying. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” said the cop sadly. “I’m just a sidewalk-flattener with the pleasant job of breaking these things to people.”

Eddie hadn’t come to yet, so just standing there looking at him didn’t do much good. It broke my heart, though. One of the doctors gave me a good stiff drink of whiskey and tried to be encouraging.

“He’ll pull through,” he said. “No doubt about it. We’ve made a preliminary examination, and I don’t even think we’ll have to resort to blood transfusion. What saved him more than anything else were the makeshift bandages that were found on him. If it hadn’t been for them he’d have been a goner long before he was picked up.”

This went over my head at the time. I didn’t understand. I thought he meant their own bandages, the hospital’s.

A couple of detectives had already been assigned to the case from the moment the cop who had found him had phoned in his report. Why wouldn’t they be? No car has ever yet been designed so that it can rip the tongue out of a man’s mouth without leaving a scratch on the rest of his face. Or deposit him neatly on the side of the road, with his feet close together and his hat resting on his stomach as if he were dozing. There wasn’t a bruise on him except the mutilations. They were waiting in the other room to talk to me when I came out of the ward, looking like a ghost.

“You his brother?”

“Yes, damn it!” I burst out. “And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!”

“Funny,” said a dick dryly, “but so do we.”

I didn’t like him much after that. Sarcasm is out of place when a man has just been brought face to face with personal tragedy.

First they told me what they already knew about Eddie, then they had me fill in the rest for them. There wasn’t very much of either. I mean that had any bearing on this.

“He runs the elevator at the Hotel Lyons, works the late shift alone, from midnight to six in the morning,” I explained.

“We checked down there already. He never showed up at all last night; they had to use the night watchman as a substitute on the car. What time did he leave your house to go to work last night?”

“Same time as always. Quarter to twelve.”

“That don’t give him much time, does it?” remarked my pet aversion irrelevantly.

My nerves were raw and I felt like snapping, “That’s no reason why he should be half tom to pieces,” but instead I said, “He only has two express stops to go, the hotel’s on Seventy-second.”

“How do you know he rode?”

“I can give you a lead on that,” I offered. “The station agent down there knows him — by sight, anyway. Kelsey’s his name. Ask him if he saw him come up last night at the usual time or not.” He went out to find a phone. “He don’t know his name,” I called after him warningly, “so just say the young fellow from the Hotel Lyons he let pass through one time when he’d lost all his change through a hole in his pocket.”

“Not bad,” remarked his mate admiringly while we were waiting. “You’ve got a good head, Mason. What do you do?”

“Master electrician. I’ve got my own store on upper Amsterdam.” The other one came back and said, “I had to wake him up at home, but he knew who I meant right away. Yeah, your brother came through the turnstile about five of twelve. Says he flipped his hand up and said, ‘Hello, you bird in a gilded cage.’ ”

“Well,” I said, and my voice broke, “then it’s a cinch he still had — his voice and his — fingers when he got out of the train. And it’s another cinch it didn’t happen to him between the station and the hotel. It’s right on the comer, that hotel is, and it’s one of the busiest comers on Broadway. Looks like the management gave you a bum steer and he did go to work after all.”

“No, that was on the up-and-up. They were even sore about it at first, until we told them he was in the hospital.”

“What were those sandwiches doing in his pocket?” the other one asked. “Looks like he stopped off somewhere first to buy food. They were still on him when he was found, one in each pocket.”

“No, my wife fixed them for him to take with him and eat on the job,” I said. “She did that every night.” I looked the other way so they wouldn’t see my eyes get cloudy. “I saw him shove them in his coat before he left the house. Now they’ll be feeding him through a tube, most likely.”

“Any way you look at it,” said the first one, “it narrows down to about five minutes in time and twenty or thirty yards in distance. He was seen leaving the station. He never got to the hotel. With lights all around as bright as day. Why, he didn’t even have to go all the way across the street — the station’s on an island in the middle!”

“What’s the good of all that?” said the one I didn’t like. “We won’t get anywhere until we find out from him himself. He knows better than anyone else what happened after he came out of the station. He’s the only one can tell us; we’ll just have to sit tight until he’s able to—”

“Tell!” I exclaimed bitterly. “How is he going to tell anybody anything after this, with no voice left and without being able to hold a pencil to paper!”

“There are ways,” he said. He flagged a nurse who had just stepped out of the ward. “When are you people going to let us at young Mason?”

“Right now, if you want to finish the job,” she snapped back at him. “He’s out of his head from shock and loss of blood. But go right in if you want to make it a murder case; maybe you’d rather handle one of those. However, if you’ll hold your horses and give us a chance to pull him through, maybe you can see him by tomorrow or the day after.”

I saw the other one, Kane, grin behind his hand. She certainly had character, that person, whoever she was. He turned back to me again after that. “I don’t want to make you feel bad, Mason, but we’ve had cases like this before. And the answer is always pretty much the same. Your brother probably got in with the wrong crowd and knew a little more than he should’ve. Who’d he run around with, any idea?”

“No one, good, bad or indifferent. If it’s gangs you’re thinking of you can drop that angle right now. He wasn’t that kind; he didn’t have the time. Know what that kid was doing? Working nights at the hotel, sleeping mornings, helping me out in the shop afternoons, and going to night school three times a week in the bargain! The couple of evenings he had left over he usually took his girl to the movies. He was no slouch, he wanted to get somewhere. And now look at him!” I turned away. “If they’d only broken his leg, or knocked out his teeth, or anything — anything but what they did do! I’m going home and drink myself to sleep, I can’t stand thinking about it any more.” Kane gave me a slap on the back in silent sympathy. Pain-in-the-face said, “We’ll want you on hand tomorrow when we try to question him; you might be some help.”

II

I was with him long before they were, from the minute they’d let me in until they told us we all had to go. About all the poor kid could talk with were his eyes, and he worked them overtime. They seemed to burn out at me sometimes, and I figured I understood what he meant.

“We’ll straighten it out, Eddie,” I promised him grimly. “We’ll get even on them — whoever they are. We’ll see that they get what’s coming to them!”

He nodded his head like wild and his eyes got wet, and the nurse gave me a dirty look for working him up.

Kane and his partner were only allowed fifteen minutes with him that first day, which was a hell of a long time at that, considering that the amputations had taken place less than forty-eight hours before. The questioning fell completely flat, just as I had expected it to. He was as completely shut off from all of us as though there was a wall built around him. The only kind of questions he could answer were those that took “yes” or “no” for an answer — by shaking his head up and down or from side to side — and that limited them to about one out of every ten that they wanted to put to him. I saw red when I saw how helpless he was. It was later that same afternoon that I dug up that permit I’d had ever since two years before when my shop was held up, and went out and bought a revolver with it. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I knew what I wanted to do with it — given the right person!

But to go back: “Did you see who did it to you?”

No, he shook.

“Well, have you any idea who it could be?”

No again.

“Been in any trouble with anyone?”

No.

“Well, where did it happen to you?”

He couldn’t answer that, naturally, so they had to shape it up for him. But it wouldn’t go over, no matter how they put it. He kept shrugging his shoulders, as if to say he didn’t know himself. His face got all white with the effort he was making to express himself and when the nurse had examined him and found out that bleeding had set in again inside his mouth, she lost her temper and told us to get out and please question somebody else if we had to ask questions. Eddie was in a faint on the pillows when she closed the door after us. That was when I went out and bought the gun, swearing under my breath.

Kane and Frozen-face showed up the next day with a couple of those charts that opticians use for testing the eyes, with capital letters all scrambled up, big at the top and getting smaller all the way down. Instead of questioning him directly any more, they had him spell out what he wanted to say letter by letter, Deadpan pointing them out on the chart and Kane jotting them down on a piece of paper — providing Eddie nodded yes — until he had complete words and sentences made up out of them. But it was as slow and tedious as teaching a cross-eyed mental defective the alphabet. The first two or three letters sometimes gave a clue to what word he had in mind: for instance, H, O meant that “hotel” was coming and they could save time and skip the T, E, L part. But others weren’t as easy as all that to figure out, and then every once in awhile they would get one all wrong and have to go back and start it over.

Well, when they were all through — and it took three or four full half-hour sessions — they were practically back where they had started from. Eddie, it turned out, was as much in the dark as the rest of us were. He had been unconscious the whole time, from a minute after leaving the subway station that night until he came to in the hospital bed where he was now, the next morning.

This was his story. Just as he got past Kelsey’s ticket window in the subway station the green lights flashed on and he had to stand there waiting before he could get across to the other side of the half-roadway. He wasn’t a heavy smoker, but as he was standing there waiting for the traffic to let up he absent-mindedly lit a cigarette. Then, when he got over and was ready to go in the hotel, he noticed what he’d done. The management was very strict about that; they didn’t allow the employees to smoke, not even in the locker-room, on pain of dismissal. Being an economical kid he hated to throw it away right after he’d begun it. The big sidewalk clock that stood out in front of the hotel said seven to twelve — the clock must have been a couple of minutes slow — so he decided to take a turn around the block and finish the cigarette before he went in.

And another thing, he admitted — there was a laugh and a tear in this if you’ve ever been twenty — he didn’t want to “spoil” the fellow he was relieving for the night by getting in too much ahead of time. So up the side-street he turned, killing time while he finished his cigarette.

It was dark and gloomy, after the glare of Broadway, and there wasn’t anyone on it at that hour. But from one end to the other of it there was a long, unbroken line of cars parked up against the sidewalk. They seemed to be empty; in any case he didn’t pay any attention to them. Halfway up the block he stopped for a moment to throw the cigarette away, and as he did so something soft was thrown up against his face from behind. It was like a hand holding a big, square folded handkerchief.

There hadn’t been a sound behind him, not even a single footfall. It was done so easily, gently almost, that for a moment he wasn’t even frightened but thought that it must be something like a rag or piece of goods that had fallen out of some window up above and blown up against his face. Then when he tried to raise his hand and brush it away, he felt something holding it. And he started to feel lazy and tired all over.

Then he felt himself being drawn backwards, like a swimmer caught in a current, but when he tried to pull away and fight off whatever it was that was happening to him, it was too late. Instead of being able to get any air in his lungs, all he kept breathing was something sweet and sickly, like suffocating flowers, and after that he didn’t know any more. When he woke up he was in agony in the hospital.

Kane got a little vial of chloroform from the nurse and wet the stopper and held it near Eddie’s face.

“Was that it? Was that what it smelt like?”

He got wild right away and tried to back his head away and nodded yes like a house afire and made growling sounds deep in his throat that went through me like a knife.

III

The three of us went outside to talk it over.

“Mistaken identity,” decided Kane. “Whoever was waiting in that car expected somebody else to go by and thought they had him when they jumped on the kid. That’s all I can make of it. Either they never found out their mistake until it was too late, or else they did but went ahead and did it anyway, afraid he’d give way on them. It’s not fool-proof, but it’s the best I can do.”

“It’s as full of holes as a Swiss cheese,” his partner told him disgustedly. “It’s like I told you before. The kid knows and he’s not telling. He talked too much, got a little present for it from somebody, and now he’s learned his lesson and isn’t making the same mistake twice.” He took the penciled sheets from Kane and shuffled through them. “It don’t hang together. Chloroform my eye! Husky twenty-year-olds don’t stand still waiting to go bye-bye like that. It don’t get them that quick; their wind’s too good. He was politely invited to step into that car by someone he knew and he didn’t dare refuse. What they did after proves it. Why the tongue and the fingers? For talking. You can’t get around that.”

I had stood all of that I could.

“Listen,” I flamed, “are you on a job to get whoever did it, or are you on a job to stand up for ’em and knock my brother?”

“Watch yourself,” he said. “I don’t like that.”

Kane came between us and gave me the wink with one eye. I suppose he gave his partner the wink with the other eye at the same time; peacemakers usually do.

Poison-mouth would have the last word, though. “If your brother would open up and give us a tip or two instead of holding out, we’d probably have the guy we want by this time.”

“And what if he’d been a stiff and couldn’t tip you off?” I squelched him. “Does that mean the guy would beat the rap altogether?”

It was probably this little set-to more than anything else that first put the idea in my mind of working on my own hook on Eddie’s behalf. Kane’s partner had him down for a gangster more or less. I knew that he wasn’t. I wanted to get even for him, more than I ever wanted anything before in my life.

Let them tackle it in their own way! I’d do a little work on the side. I didn’t have any idea of what I was going to do — then or for some time afterwards. All I knew was whoever did that to Eddie wasn’t going to get away with it — not if it took me the rest of my life to catch up with them.

They had left the charts behind while they were out rounding up small-time racketeers and poolroom-lizards that had never heard of Eddie, and I worked over them with him daily. We got so that we could handle them much faster than in the beginning.

And then one day, out of all the dozens, the hundreds of questions I kept throwing at him, the right one popped out. The minute I asked it, even before he gave me the answer, I knew I had hit something. I wondered why I hadn’t asked it long ago.

He had worked at another hotel called the San Pablo before going to the Lyons. But this had been quite awhile before.

“None of the guests from there ever turned up later at the Lyons while you were there, did they?” I asked.

Yes, one did, he spelled back. His name was Dr. Avalon. He’d left the San Pablo before Eddie himself did, and then when Eddie got the job at the Lyons he found he’d moved there ahead of him, that was all.

Maybe this was just a coincidence, but all the same I kept digging at it.

“Did he recognize you?”

He nodded.

“What did he say when he first saw you?”

He’d smiled jovially at Eddie and said, “Young fellow, are you following me around?” Then he’d given him a five-dollar tip.

“Pretty big tip, wasn’t it?”

Yes, but then at the San Pablo, Eddie recalled, he had once given him a ten-dollar one. This was getting interesting.

“Whew!” I said. “What for?”

Eddie smiled a little.

Something about a woman, as I might know.

“Better tell me about it,” I urged.

One night about one o’clock, his message ran, a young woman who acted kind of nervous had got on the car and asked Eddie which floor Dr. Avalon was on. So he took her to the door and showed her. But it was a long hallway and before he could get back to the cage again, Avalon had let her in and he heard him say in a loud voice: “You shouldn’t have come here! I don’t see anybody here! You should have seen me in my office tomorrow.”

And she had answered, “But I had to see you!”

Well, Eddie had thought it was the usual thing, some kind of a love affair going on. But about half an hour later he was called back to the floor and when he got up there he found Avalon standing waiting for him, all excited, his face running with sweat, and he shoved a piece of paper with something written on it at him and told him to run out and find an all-night drugstore and bring back some medicine as quickly as he could.

“Hurry! Hurry!” he said. “Every minute counts!”

Eddie did, and when he got back with it he knocked on the door, but not very loudly because he didn’t want to wake up people in the other rooms. The doctor must have been too excited to pay any attention because he didn’t come to the door right away, so Eddie tried the knob, found that it had been left open, and walked in. He saw the doctor’s visitor stretched out on a table with a very white light shining down on her and a sheet or something over her. Then the doctor came rushing over at him and for a minute he thought he was going to kill him, he looked so terrible.

“Get out of here, you!” he yelled at him. “What do you mean by coming in here?” and practically threw him out of the door.

About an hour later the young lady and the doctor showed up together and rode down in Eddie’s car as cool and collected as if nothing had happened. The doctor showed her to a taxi at the door, and it was when he came in and rode upstairs again that he gave Eddie the ten dollars, saying he was sorry he had lost his head like that, but she had had a very bad heart attack and it was lucky he had pulled her through.

“Did he ask you not to say anything?”

Eddie nodded, and again smiled a little sheepishly. But I knew he didn’t get the point at all. He thought it was just some love affair that the doctor wanted kept quiet. I knew better. The man was a shady doctor and ran the risk of imprisonment day and night.

“Then what happened?”

Eddie hadn’t opened his mouth at all to anyone, but not long after some men had come around and stopped at the desk and asked questions about the doctor, men wearing iron hats and chewing cigars in the corner of their mouths, and when they learned he wasn’t in they said they’d come back next day. But before they did the doctor had left, bag and baggage. Eddie said he never saw anyone leave in such a hurry. It was at five thirty in the morning and Eddie was still on duty.

“Did he say anything to you?”

No, he had just looked at him kind of funny, and Eddie hadn’t known what to make of it.

I did, though. I was beginning to see things clearer and clearer every moment. I was beginning to have a little trouble with my breathing, it kept coming faster all the time.

“Time’s up,” said the nurse from the doorway.

“Not yet it isn’t,” I told her. “I’m not going to have to do any questioning after today, so back out while I take a couple minutes more to wind it all up.” I turned to Eddie. “And when you ran into him again at the Lyons he said ‘Young fellow, are you following me around?’, did he? And smiled at you, did he? And gave you a tip for no reason at all, did he?”

Eddie nodded three times.

I clenched my teeth tight. I had everything I needed, knew all I wanted to, and yet — I couldn’t have made the slimmest charge stick and I knew it; I didn’t have any evidence. A ten-dollar tip, a hasty departure, an everyday wisecrack like “Are you following me around?” — you can’t bring charges against anyone on the strength of those alone.

“What’s he like?” I asked.

Short and dumpy, came the answer. He wore a black beard, not the bushy kind, but curly and trimmed close to his face.

“Did he always have it?”

Not at the San Pablo, no. He’d only had a mustache there, but he’d grown the beard after he moved to the Lyons.

Just in case, I thought, the cigar-chewing gentlemen with the iron hats showed up again. That wasn’t very clever. Something told me that this Dr. Avalon was not quite right in his head — which made the whole thing all the more gruesome. Frozen-face’s gangsters were angels of light and sweetness compared to a maniac like this.

“Did he ever act a little strangely, I mean different from other people, as far as you could notice?”

No, except that he seemed absent-minded and used to smile a lot about nothing at all.

I only asked Eddie one more question. “What was his room number at the Lyons?”

He didn’t know for sure, but he had always taken him up to the eighth floor.

I got up to go.

“I won’t be in to see you tomorrow,” I told him casually. “I’m going to drop by the hotel and collect the half week’s wages they still owe you.” But there was a far bigger debt than that I was going to collect for him. “In case I don’t get around for the next few days, I’ll have the wife stay with you to keep you company. Not a tumble to her or to those two flatfeet, either, the next time they come around on one of their semi-annual visits.”

I think he knew. He just looked at me and narrowed his eyes down, and we shook hands hard.

“Don’t worry, Eddie, everything’s under control — now.”

IV

When I got back to my own house I put the revolver in an empty suitcase and carried it out with me. From there I stopped off at the shop and put in several lengths of copper wire and an awl and a screwdriver and some metal disks and a little black soundbox with some batteries inside it, something on the order of a telephone baseboard. I also put in several other little tools and gadgets you’d have to be a master electrician to know anything about. I told my assistant to keep things running, that I was going out to wire a concert hall, and I rode down to the Hotel Lyons and checked in. I signed the register “T. Mallory, Buffalo,” and told them I was very particular about where I slept. The seventh floor wasn’t quite high enough, and the ninth floor was just a little too high. How about something on the eighth? So they gave me 802.1 didn’t even know if he was still in the hotel at all, but it was taking too much of a chance to ask; he might have gotten wind of it. So I paid for three days in advance and said: “Don’t be surprised if I ask you to change me in a day or two. I’m a very hard customer to please.” Which was perfectly all right with them, they told me.

When I got up to the room I just put the valise down without unpacking it and killed a little time, and then I went downstairs with a newspaper in my pocket and grabbed a chair in the lobby that faced the entrance and sat there from then on. From six until eleven I sat there like that with the paper spread out in front of my face. I never turned a page of it because that would have covered over the two little eye-holes I’d made in it with the point of a pencil. At eleven-thirty they started to put the lights out around me and I couldn’t stay there any longer without attracting attention. So I got up and went up to my room. He’d never shown up. For all I knew he’d beat it right after — what he did to Eddie; maybe he wasn’t even living in the building any more. I had to find out and find out quick, otherwise I was just wasting my time. But how, without asking openly? And I couldn’t do that, it would give me away.

In the morning I thought of a way, and it worked. I remembered a song of years back that strangely enough had the same name as the man I was tracking down — Avalon. When the chambermaid came in to clean up the room I got busy and started singing it for all I was worth. I didn’t know the words and I didn’t know the music, so I faked it, but I put in plenty of Avalon. She was a friendly old soul and stood there grinning at me.

“Like it?” I said.

“What’s it supposed to be?” she asked.

“It’s called Avalon,” I said. “Isn’t that a funny name for a song?”

“It is,” she admitted. “We got a doctor in this hotel by the same name.”

I laughed as though I didn’t believe her.

“What room is he in?” I asked skeptically.

“815,” she said. “He’s a permanent, that’s how I know his name.” I went down to the desk and said: “I didn’t sleep a wink last night; you’ve got to give me something else.”

The clerk unfolded a floor-plan and we began to consult it together. 815, I saw at a glance, was a suite of two-rooms-and-a-bath, at the end of the hallway. It sealed it up like the cross-bar of a T. All the others were singles, lying on each side of the hallway; only two of them, therefore, adjoined it.

I pointed to one. “That’s a nice layout. 814. How about that?” They had someone in there.

“Or this?” I put my finger on 813.

No good either.

“What’s it worth to you to put me in one of those two rooms?” I said abruptly. “I’ll double the rate if you switch me in and move the other tenant elsewhere.”

He gave me a funny look, as if to say, “What’re you up to?” but I didn’t care.

“I’m a crank,” I said. “At home I sleep on three mattresses.” I handed him a cigar wrapped in a five-spot and half an hour later I was in 814 and had the door locked.

I spent the next half hour after that sounding out the wall, the one between me and him, with my knuckles and my eardrum. I had to go easy, because I didn’t know whether he was in the room or not at the time and I didn’t want to arouse his suspicions.

Just when I was wondering whether I should take a chance or not and go ahead, I got a break. The telephone on the other side of the wall, his telephone, started to ring. All that came through to where I was was a faint, faraway tinkle. It kept on for awhile and then it quit of its own accord. But it told me two things that I wanted to know very badly. It told me he wasn’t there to answer it, and it gave me a very good idea of just how thick the wall was. It was too thick to hear anything through, it needed fixing. I opened my suitcase, got out my tools, and got busy drilling and boring. I kept my ears open the whole time because I knew I’d have to quit the minute I heard him open his door and come in. But he never did. He must have been out for the day.

I finished a little before four in the afternoon. Finished on my side of the wall, anyway. I had the tiny hole bored all the way through, the wiring strung through and the soundbox screwed in behind a radiator where it wasn’t noticeable. I swept up all the little specks of plaster in my handkerchief and dropped them out the window. You couldn’t notice anything unless you looked very closely. But I had to get in on the other side, his side of the wall, and hook up the little disk, the “mike,” before it would work. Without that it was dead, no good at all.

The set-up, I had better explain, was not a dictaphone. It didn’t record anything, all it did was amplify the sounds it picked up in his room and bring them through into mine, the way a loudspeaker would. In other words, it was no good as evidence without a witness. But to hell with witnesses and all legal red tape! I was out to pay him back for Eddie and I figured he’d be too clever for me if it came to an open arraignment in a criminal court. I didn’t have anything on him that a smart enough lawyer couldn’t have blown away like a bunch of soap-bubbles, and yet I could have sworn on a stack of Bibles that he was the guy I was looking for.

The next step was to get in there. I examined the outside of my window, which faced the same way as his, but that was no good. Neither of them had a fire-escape or even a ledge to cross over by. It was also pretty late in the afternoon by now and he might be coming in any minute. Much as I hated to waste another night, I figured I would have to put it off until the morning. Of course, I was taking a chance on his noticing any small grains of mortar or plaster that might have fallen to the floor on his side. But that couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t very likely anyway, I consoled myself. It was one of those thousand-to-one shots that life is full of.

I didn’t undress at all that night or go to bed. I kept pacing back and forth on the carpet, stopping every few minutes to listen at the door and at the wall. There wasn’t a sound the whole night through. Nobody came and nobody went. 815 might have been vacant for all the signs of life it gave.

In the morning the same chambermaid as before came to make the room up. I mussed up the bed just before she came in so it looked as if it had been slept in. When she was through she went into 815 and left the door ajar after her. House-regulations, I suppose. It was a two-room suite, remember.

I gave her about five minutes to get through with one of the rooms — either one, it didn’t matter — and then I stole out of my room, closed the door after me, and edged up to the door of 815 until I could look in. If anyone coming along the corridor had seen me I was going to pretend she had forgotten to leave towels in my room and I was looking for her. She was in the living room. It was even easier than I had expected, because she was running a baby vacuum-cleaner across the floor and the buzz it made drowned out my footsteps.

I waited until she had her back to me and then I gave a quick jump in through the door and past her line of vision. The bed in the bedroom was made up, so I knew she was through in there and wouldn’t come back again. I ducked down behind a big stuffed chair and waited. I had the copper disk, the rubber mat it went on, and the tools I needed in the side pocket of my coat.

I began to get cramped squatting down on my heels, but after awhile she got through and went out. I waited another minute or two after that, and then I got up, slipped into the living room and got to work. One good thing, there wasn’t much noise to this part of the job, I had done all the drilling and pecking from my side. If he came in and caught me at it I was going to pretend I was the hotel electrician and had been ordered to put in a new outlet or something. The trouble was I wasn’t dressed for the part, and being a permanent in the hotel he might know the real electrician by sight. It occurred to me, now that it was too late, that I should have had the revolver with me instead of leaving it behind in my own room like a fool.

But I was through in no time at all. All I had to do was get hold of the ends of the wire, draw them the rest of the way through the hole, hook them onto the disk, and screw the disk onto the baseboard of the wall. It was no bigger than a coffee saucer, still it was coppery and bright. But I fixed that by shifting a chair over in front of it. In five minutes I was through. It was still dead, but all it needed now was to be grounded on one of the light fixtures in my own room. I let myself out, went back there, and did it. Now I was all set.

V

I went out and got some food, and then when I was through eating I did a funny thing. I went into a butcher shop to buy some more. But I knew what I was doing.

“I want a lamb’s tongue,” I told him. “Look in your icebox and bring me out the smallest one you’ve got.”

When he did it was still too big.

“Cut it down,” I said. “Just the tip and not much more.”

He looked at me as though I was crazy, but he went ahead and did it. Then he took a nice clean piece of waxpaper and started wrapping it up.

“No, not that,” I told him. “Find a piece with a lot of blood on it, all smeary, and wrap it in that. Then put a clean piece around the outside of it.”

I took it back with me in my pocket, and when I got up to my room I wrote “Dr. Avalon” in pencil on the outside of it. Then I put it down outside his door, as if a delivery boy had left it there, and went back into my room and waited.

Now I was going to know for sure. If he had nothing on his conscience and came home and found that there, he wouldn’t think anything of it — he’d think it was either a practical joke or that somebody else’s order had been left at his door by mistake. But if he had a guilty conscience this was going to catch him off his guard and make him give himself away; he wouldn’t be able to help it. It wouldn’t have been human not to — even if it was only for a minute or two. And if there was anyone else in on it with him — and I had a hunch there was — the first thing he’d think of would be to turn to them for help and advice in his panic and terror. So I waited, stretched out on my bed, with the revolver in my pocket and my head close to the wall apparatus.

He came in around six. I heard his door open and then close again, and I jumped off the bed and took a peek through my own door. The package was gone, he’d taken it in with him. I went back and listened in. I could hear the paper crackling while he unwrapped it as clearly as if it had been in my own room. Then there was a gasp — the sound a man suffering from asthma makes trying to get his breath back. Then, plop! He had dropped it in his fright. The wiring was working without a hitch; I wasn’t missing a thing.

After that I heard the clink of a glass. He was pouring himself a drink. It clinked again right after that, and then I heard him give sort of a moan. That was a dead giveaway; a man doesn’t take two drinks to keep his courage up just because the butcher has left the wrong order at his door. He’d done that to my brother all right, he and nobody else. More rage and hate went through me than I ever thought I had in me. I could feel my lower jaw quivering as if I was a big dog getting ready to take a bite out of somebody. I had to hang on to the sides of the bed to stay where I was a little longer.

Then I heard his voice for the first time. The wiring played it up louder than it really was, like a projection machine. It sounded all hollow and choked. He was asking for a number at the phone. Regency, four-two-eight-one. I whipped a pencil out and scrawled it on my wall.

“Hello,” he said huskily. “This is Avalon. Can you hear me? I don’t want to talk very loud.” His voice dropped to a mumble, but the wiring didn’t let me down, it came in at ordinary conversational pitch and I could still follow it. “Somebody’s on to us, and we better take a powder out while we still have the chance. I thought I’d let you know, that’s all.” Then he said, “No, no, no, not that at all. If that’s all it was I could get around that with one hand tied behind my back. It’s that other thing. You know, the night three of us went for an airing — and two of us came back. Don’t ask me how I know! I can’t tell you over this phone, there’s someone at the switchboard downstairs. You hang up,” he said, “and stand by. I’ll call you right back. I’ll use the direct wire from the cigar store downstairs, just to be on the safe side.”

He hung up and I heard him come out and go down the hallway past my door. He sounded in a hurry.

I didn’t waste any time. I grabbed my own phone and got Headquarters. “Put Kane on quick, or that other guy working with him. Never mind, you’ll do, whoever you are! It’s on the Mason case and it’s only good for five minutes, it’s got to be worked fast. Trace Regency four-two-eight-one and get whoever you find at the other end; he’s on the line right now getting a call. Get him first and then look up the cases afterwards if you have to. It opened May fifteenth. Never mind who I am or where I am; I’m too busy, got no time to tell you now.” I hung up, opened the door, and went out into the hall.

I was going to wait for him outside his own door and corner him when he came back, but when I looked I saw that he’d forgotten to close it in his hurry. It stood open on a crack. So I pushed it open and went in, hoping I might find something in the way of evidence to lay my hands on before he had a chance to do away with it. I closed the door after me, so that he wouldn’t notice anything from the other end of the hall and be able to turn back in time.

The place was just about as I remembered it from the last time I’d been in it. That was only the afternoon before, but it already seemed like a year ago. The liquor he’d braced himself with was standing in a decanter on the table. The bloody parcel from the butcher was lying on the carpet where he’d dropped it. There was a doctor’s kit on the seat of a chair, with a lot of gleaming, sharp-edged little instruments in it. I figured he’d used one of these on Eddie, and all my rage came back. I heard him fitting his key into the outside door, and I jumped back into the bathroom and got behind the shower curtain. I wanted to see what he’d do first, before I nabbed him.

What gave me time enough to get out of sight was that he was so excited it took him nearly a whole minute to get his key fitted into the keyhole straight enough to get the door open. The bathroom door had a mirror on the outside of it, and I saw his face in that as he went by. It was evil, repulsive; you could tell by his face that his reason was slowly crumbling. He had his mouth open as if he was panting for air. The black beard, short as it was, made him look a little bit like an ape standing on its hind legs. He kept going back and forth, carrying clothes out of the closet. He was getting ready to make another get-away, like that time at the San Pablo. But this time it wasn’t going to work.

I waited until I heard the latches on his suitcases click shut, and then I stepped softly over the rim of the tub and edged my way to the bathroom door. I got the gun out, flicked open the safety clip and held it in my hand. Then I lounged around the angle of the doorway into the living room, like a lazy corner loafer. He didn’t see me at first. The valises were standing in the middle of the room ready to move out, and he had gone over to the window and was standing looking anxiously out with his back to me. Waiting for his accomplice to stop by with a car and get him, I suppose.

I was halfway across the room now.

“You’ve got a visitor, Dr. Avalon,” I said grimly. “Turn around and say hello to Eddie Mason’s brother.”

I was right in back of him by that time. He twisted around as suddenly as when you crack a whip, and when he saw me his eyes got big. I was holding the gun pressed close up against my side, muzzle trained on him. He saw that too. His face turned gray and he made a strangling sound in his throat, too frightened even to yell. He took a deep breath and I could tell that he was trying to get a grip on himself and pull himself together. Finally he managed to get his voice back to work again. “Who are you? Who’s Eddie Mason? I never—” Without taking my eyes off him I gave the bloody package on the floor a shove forward with my foot. “Now do you know why I’m here?” He cringed and gibbered at me, more like an ape than ever. “I didn’t know what I was doing! I–I didn’t mean to go that far, something got the better of me. I just meant to frighten him.”

“Why I don’t let fly and put these six in you is more than I can understand,” I growled. “That’s what I came here for, and the quicker it’s over the better!”

“I didn’t kill him, though!” he protested. “I didn’t take his life away! You can’t do this to me—”

“Then you admit you did it, don’t you? That’s no news to me — but we’re not going to keep it a secret between you and me and Regency four-two-eight-one. Get a piece of paper and write down what I tell you to — and then after you’ve signed it, we’ll see. I’m giving you more of a break than you deserve; you ought to be stepped on like a toad and squashed!”

“Yes, yes, anything — I’ll do anything you say,” he murmured. He was drooling with relief. He gestured vaguely to the back of me. “There’s a pen and paper — on that desk right behind you, just hand them to me—”

I should have remembered that there wasn’t any; I’d come by there only a moment ago. I should have remembered there was a streak of insanity in him, and that always makes for greater cleverness when they’re cornered than a normal person shows. But he caught me off my guard, and I half-turned to reach behind me.

Instantly there was a blinding flash of light and something broke all over my head and shoulders. The decanter, I suppose, that had been standing on the table alongside of us. But he must have had it ready in his hand for several moments past without my realizing it, to be able to bring it down so quickly. And at the same time he gripped me by the wrist so suddenly with his other hand, and wrenched it around so violently, that there wasn’t even time to flex the trigger finger, and the gun went spinning loosely out of my hand as though I had been twirling it around on one finger.

The last thing I was conscious of was a dull thud somewhere across the room as it landed harmlessly on the carpet. I went out like a light, with whiskey, or maybe it was blood, streaming down into my ears and eyes.

VI

When my head cleared and I came to, I was no longer flat on the floor, but upright in a chair. Each ankle was tied to a leg of it by long strips torn from a shirt or piece of underwear. I was sitting on my own hands and they were fastened to the seat of it in some ingenious way — I think by another long strip running around the whole chair and passing under my body.

The position was a torture to my bent wrists, especially the one he had sprained. What I mistook at first for a fuzzy taste in my mouth turned out to be a gag loosely stuffed into it. I could see the gun out of the comer of my eye, still lying where it had fallen. I was thankful for a minute that he hadn’t picked it up and turned it on me. Then, as I concentrated my full attention on him, something told me I was wrong about that — it might have been better for me if he had.

He had his back to me and I didn’t know what he was doing at first. Or rather, my mind didn’t know yet, but my instincts seemed to, beforehand. The way animals know things. The short hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and my heart was icy. My breath was coming like a bellows. He had a bright white light on, some kind of an adjustable doctor’s lamp, like the time Eddie had caught sight of him working over that woman. That didn’t frighten me. He kept making little clinking sounds, as if he was picking up and putting down metal instruments one by one. That didn’t frighten me much either, although I began to have an inkling of what was up.

He wouldn’t dare, I told myself. He wouldn’t be crazy enough to! I wasn’t Eddie, shanghaied off in the middle of the night without even a look at who had done it. We were in a hotel with hundreds of people all around us. We were in rooms he had been known to occupy for months past. Anything that happened here would point right at him. If he left me here his number was up, and on the other hand there was no way of getting me out of the place without being seen.

But when he turned around and looked at me, I knew he would dare. He’d dare anything. Not because he didn’t know any better, but simply because he’d lost all caution. What the lamp and the metal instruments hadn’t been able to do, one look at his sleepy eyes did.

Then I knew fear. I was in the presence of full-fledged insanity. Maybe it had always been there and he’d kept it covered up. Maybe the fright I’d given him before had brought it out in him at last. But there it was, staring me in the face and horrible to look at. Vacant eyes and an absent-minded smile that never changed. So peaceful, so gentle, like a kind-hearted old family doctor pottering around.

I sat there helpless, like a spectator at a show. And what a show! What frightened me more than anything else was to watch the deliberate, cold-blooded professional way he was saturating a number of pads with disinfectant. I would have given anything now if he had only used the gun on me. It would have been better than what was coming. I heard and whipped myself around and fell over sideways with the chair, giving myself another knock on the head. But I was too frightened to pass out any more. He came over and lifted me up and stood me straight again, chair and all, gently, almost soothingly, as if I was a kid with the colic.

“Don’t be impatient,” he said softly. “It will be over soon. I’m almost ready for you now.”

If it’s going to be like what happened to Eddie, I prayed desperately, let his hand slip and make it the throat instead!

He brought out a newspaper and spread it on the floor all around me.

“That will catch any drops that fall,” he purred. “I used one with your brother too. It’s the best absorbent there is.”

The sweat was running down my face in streams by this time. The whole thing was like a bad dream. He had a number of sharp little scalpels laid out in a row on the table and they gleamed under the light. He selected one, breathed lovingly on it, and then turned around and came back to me, smiling dreamily.

“I suppose it’s wrong of me not to use chloroform,” he said, “but that’s what you get for coming to me after office hours!” And then he suddenly broke out into an insane hysterical laugh that just about finished me. “Now, my friend,” he said, “here’s how we do it.” He reached down and daintily plucked at the gag until he had drawn it all out of my mouth.

I had been waiting for that, it was the only chance I had. I let out the loudest yell that that hotel room or any other had ever heard. Tied up as I was, it actually lifted me an inch or two above the chair, I put such volume into it. What it would have sounded like in my own room, had anyone been there to hear it, I can only imagine.

He gripped me cruelly by the lower jaw and pulled it down until I thought it would fracture, so that I couldn’t yell any more. Then with his other elbow he pressed my forehead and the upper part of my face back flat. I couldn’t close my mouth and my head was held in a vise. One whole arm was still free from the elbow down, remember, even if it didn’t have much room to swing in. And that was the one that held the scalpel. I saw the shiny thing flash before my face as he turned it to get a better leverage. I was pretty far gone, but not far enough. I knew I was going to feel everything that was going to happen.

“What’s going on in here?” a voice asked somewhere in back of me. Not a very excited voice either. He let go of me and straightened up.

“How dare you come in here without knocking while I am treating one of my patients?” I heard him say. My luck was that I hadn’t passed out a minute ago, as frightened as I was. His voice carried so much conviction and dignity he might have gotten away with it, whether I was tied or not. I couldn’t yell any more, I couldn’t even talk, but I showed whoever it was in the only way I could. I tipped myself over and hit the floor once more, and threshed around there trying to free myself.

I stayed conscious but everything around me was a blur for several minutes. When it came back in focus again I was standing up and my bonds had been loosened. They were all standing around me, the manager, the hotel detective, the porter, and everyone else.

“Did you get that guy?” was the first thing I asked. They shook their heads. Someone motioned and I turned around and looked.

The window was wide open, and the curtains were hanging on the outside of the sill instead of on the inside, as though something heavy had dragged them across it. Down below on the street you could hear some woman screaming, and people were running up from all directions.

“Better so,” I said as I turned back to them. “It’s a good thing you came when you did,” I told the hotel dick. “How did it happen?”

He looked embarrassed.

“Well, you see,” he stammered, “we happened to be in your room at the time — er — investigating that hook-up of yours, which had been reported to us by the maid, and we heard something going on in here through the wall. But until you gave that loud yell we thought he was just treating a patient. Even then we weren’t sure, until I opened the door with a passkey and took a look.”

“Well,” I said, “outside of a sprained wrist, a stiff jaw and a bump on the head I feel a lot better than I would’ve if you hadn’t showed up.”

There was a commotion at the door and Kane’s partner came hustling in, by himself. “We got that guy at Regency 428, and he broke like a toothpick! He’s a hophead the doctor’s been supplying and he drove the car that night—”

As I was leaving I stuck my tongue out at him, to everyone’s surprise. “Just wanted to show you I’ve still got it,” I said. I never liked that guy.

I stopped in at the hospital to see Eddie. He saw the plaster on my scalp and the gauze around my wrist and we just looked at each other quietly.

“It’s all right, kid,” I said after awhile. “Everything’s all right — now.”

It will be, too. They have artificial fingers these days that are as good as the real ones. And a man can become a good electrician without — having to talk very much.